THE TENTACLE OF THE RELIGIOUS TRACTS

The book portrays American tract culture (c. 1790–1900) as a mass-publishing and distribution system—a “Benevolent Empire” infrastructure that tried to scale Protestant influence via short printed literature, agents, and societies. The central claim isn’t merely that tracts existed, but that tract-society machinery functioned like a parallel church-system: boards, officers, constitutions, fundraising, annual reports, and colporteurs doing “religious work” outside local-church authority.

A key hinge is the “no-sectarian” rule (especially with the American Tract Society): publishing had to satisfy a broad evangelical coalition, so content tended toward lowest-common-denominator theology and committee-safe emphasis. The slavery controversy is used to show how “agreement of all” can pressure a society toward strategic silence to preserve cooperation and distribution.

Instead of treating tracts as just titles, the document classifies the roles/genres tract systems require:

1. Organizers/Secretaries – operations, routing, finance, staffing.

2. Editors/Compilers – gatekeepers who standardize tone and committee approval.

3. Clergy polemicists – campaign pamphlets (anti-X, pro-reform).

4. Moral storytellers – narrative persuasion (domestic piety, temperance ruin, deathbed scenes).

5. Eyewitness/testimony writers – conversion/persecution “I saw/I was changed” accounts.

6. Sensational pamphleteers – outrage/fear selling; high emotion, low truth-discipline.

7. Movement philosophers – the meta-justifiers who frame the whole apparatus as providential progress and measurable “impact.”

“Principal writers” are often shown to be reprinted British evangelicals, industrially circulated in America (Legh Richmond’s Dairyman’s Daughter is the model template).

From the Old School Baptist angle, the objection is ecclesiology + causality: tracts may inform, but they don’t create life; voluntary societies imitate church functions without church accountability; and tract-genres can train people to confuse moral reformation or scripted “decisions” with grace, turning “success” into circulation and statistics.